White House Promises to Produce Missing E-Mails

It took a $10 million search effort and almost four years of stalling, but Bush administration officials say they will meet the demands of a court order to produce 14 million missing e-mails from 2003-2005. The missing e-mails cover the start of the Iraq war, the Valerie Plame affair and the White House response to Hurricane Katrina. Groups that sued the White House over the missing e-mails are still skeptical.

Just hours after a judge Jan. 14 ordered the White House to search the
entire Executive Office of the President and the Office of
Administration to collect and preserve all e-mails sent or received
between March 2003 and
October 2005, a Bush administration official said the White House would
meet its legal obligations. Millions of White House e-mails are missing
from the period.

Federal law requires the
preservation of all White House e-mail. The
period of time covered by the order includes the start of the Iraq war,
the Valerie Plame affair and the White House response to Hurricane
Katrina. Two private watchdog groups -- Citizens for Responsibility and
Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive have sued
the White House to produce and preserve the missing e-mails.

"The
court made clear today that any additional work that the White House
has to do before its occupants depart is its own fault," Meredith
Fuchs, general counsel for the National Archive, said in a statement. "As the magistrate judge
implied, they rolled the dice hoping they would get this case thrown
out of court and they lost. Now they have to make up for lost time."

Helen H. Hong, a Department of Justice attorney representing the White
House, admitted the Bush administration had hoped to get the lawsuits
dismissed but White House search efforts had produced the missing
e-mails. Hong said private contractors discovered the missing e-mails
after reviewing more than 60,000 backup tapes at a cost of $10 million.

The missing e-mails were first revealed during a congressional investigation of the firing of U.S. attorneys general. The
White
House contends an administration migration from Lotus Notes to Exchange
resulted in "some" archived e-mails being mislabeled, making them
difficult to find using routine
search protocols.
CREW
originally filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Office
of Administration on March 29, 2007, regarding records of the missing
e-mails. When the Office of Administration refused to turn over the information, CREW
sued the White House May 23, 2007, for the information. The organization also
released a report on the missing e-mails based on information obtained
from two confidential sources.

Following up on CREW's information, the National Security Archive
also sued the White House on Sept. 5, 2007. The National Security Archive and
CREW have subsequently consolidated their legal actions against the
White House to force disclosure of the missing e-mails.

As part of the Jan. 14 court order, the White House is required to take
all necessary steps to secure files from individual computer
workstations, memory sticks, zip drives, DVDs and CDs. Both CREW and
National Archive officials questioned whether the new White House
disclosures will actually cover all of the missing e-mails.
"The
White House admitted it did nothing to stop people working in the White
House from disposing of memory sticks, CDs, DVDs and zip drives that
may have been the sole copies of missing e-mails on them," said Sheila
Shadmand of Jones Day, another attorney for the National Archive."We believe our ability to get a complete restoration of the
White House record from 2003 to 2005 and evidence of what went wrong
has been compromised."
Tom Blanton, director of the National Archive, suggested more
oversight was needed of the White House e-mail preservation efforts.
"If this kind of irresponsible conduct can take
place despite the Executive Office of the President's obligations under
the Federal Records Act and this lawsuit, then perhaps the country
needs more oversight of record-keeping in the White House," Blanton said.